21 June - 22 June | 10:00 - 15:30 each day | Online
Across the United Kingdom and beyond, an increasing number of universities are realising the strategic importance of conducting research with public engagement. Engaging publics can strengthen the relevance and accountability of research, while also maximising its impact. This two-day, virtual training event—organised by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of East Anglia, with support from CHASE—is aimed at familiarising postgraduate students and early-career researchers with the values, purposes, and different types of engagement. Topics covered include research and film, podcasting, policymaking, data visualization, and the media.
Event Schedule:
June 21
10-10.15 – Welcome and Introductions (Dr Ben Little; Dr Matt Taunton)
10.15-11 – Embedding Equity and Communities into Public Engagement (Lewis Hou)
11-11.15 – Break
11.15-12 – Panel Discussion - Research, Policy Processes and Political Leadership (Dr James Meadway; Professor Toby James; Dr Sally Broughton Micova)
12-12.15 – Break
12.15-13 – Panel Discussion - Research, Engagement and Podcasting. (Megan Bradshaw; Catherine Carr)
13-13.45 – Lunch Break
13.45-14.30 – Research and the Media (Prof. Kate Williams)
14.30- 14.45 – Break
14.45-15.30 – From Research to Journalistic Language (The Conversation UK)
June 22nd
10-10.45 – Film, Research, and Public Engagement (Prof. Eylem Atakav)
10.45 - 11 – Break
11-11.45 – Science Communication and Engagement (Prof. Laura Bowater)
11.45-12 – Break
12-12.45 – Shaping Public Attitudes with Research: Data Collection and Visualisation (Dr William Allen)
12.45-13.30 – Lunch Break
13.30-14.15 – Ghostwriting as Engagement (Dr Deborah Grayson)
14.15-14.30 – Break
14.30-15.15 – Fiction, Non-Fiction, Research, Writing, Activism (Dr Malachi Macintosh)
15.15 - 15.30 – Plenary and Concluding Remarks
Speakers’ Biographies
Dr William Allen is a Researcher at COMPAS, working with the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity at the University of Oxford. His research areas are in political communication and public opinion, particularly how media relate to immigration attitudes and policymaking. Currently, he is focusing on data visualisations about migration and mobility as brokered outputs that relate to public perceptions and political behaviour. He is also developing theories of knowledge exchange among migration researchers and the wider public, in order to inform more effective practice.
Professor Eylem Atakav is Professor of Film, Gender and Public Engagement at the University of East Anglia where she teaches courses on women and world cinema; gender and Middle Eastern media. She is the author of Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation (2012) and editor of Directory of World Cinema: Turkey (Intellect, 2013). She is the director of Growing Up Married – an internationally acclaimed documentary about forced marriage and child brides in Turkey; and co-director of Lifeline, a new documentary that reveals the reality of working in the frontline of the domestic abuse sector in the UK during the pandemic.
Professor Laura Bowater is the Academic Director for Innovation at UEA, and the former Associate Dean for Enterprise and Engagement in the Faculty of Medicine and Health. She has been awarded funding from a wide variety of organisations for science communication activities, including the Society of General Microbiology (SGM). She is also the author of a popular science book, The Microbes Fight Back: Antibiotic Resistance (2017).
Megan Bradshaw is a full-time globalisation manager in the tech industry and a part-time PhD student in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Litro, The London Magazine, Asymptote Journal, and elsewhere. 50 East, her first novel, was submitted as the final project for her MA in Writing from the University of Warwick (Distinction, 2019). Her doctoral project is a family memoir focusing on food, identity, and diaspora in world literature.
Sally Broughton Micova joined UEA in September 2015 as a Lecturer in Communications Policy and Politics in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies. She currently teaches modules related to politics and the media and political communication. She is a member of UEA's Centre for Competition Policy (CCP). Prior to joining UEA she was an LSE Fellow in Media Governance and Policy and Deputy Director of the LSE Media Policy Project in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Catherine Carr is the host of Relatively podcast, and the producer of Talking Politics, a highly successful podcast hosted by Prof. David Runciman with Prof. Helen Thompson, which provides academic but accessible analyses of today's global political situation. Ms Carr is also a presenter on the BBC World Service, a reporter for BBC Radio 4, and an award-winning documentary maker.
Dr Deborah Grayson is a postdoctoral researcher based at Goldsmiths University. She is currently working on The BBC and Beyond, a campaign from the Media Reform Coalition, reimagining what public media can be in the digital age. Dr Grayson is also a member of the Soundings editorial collective and co-founded of The GLC Story, a community archiving project which aims to connect contemporary Londoners with the radical history of the 1980s Greater London Council. Dr Grayson is an experienced ghost-writer.
Lewis Hou is the founder and director of the Science Ceilidh, an organisation making connections between communities, education, research and culture across Scotland. He is also development coordinator for The Ideas Fund, a member of the Anti-Racist Educator Collective as well as a associate trainer with the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement.
Professor Toby James is Professor of Politics and Public Policy in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is currently deputy director of the Electoral Integrity Project and editor-in-chief of Policy Studies. Prof. James’s research focuses on the administration and management of the electoral process, the policy process and political leadership. He is the author of Elite Statecraft and Election Administration (Palgrave, 2012) and Comparative Electoral Management (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor of British Labour Leaders and British Conservative Leaders (both Biteback, 2015).
Dr Malachi McIntosh is editor and publishing director of Wasafiri. He previously co-led the Runnymede Trust’s award-winning Our Migration Story project and spent four years as a lecturer in postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Emigration and Caribbean Literature (2015) and the editor of Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (2016). His fiction and non-fiction have been published widely, including in the Caribbean Review of Books, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, The Guardian, The Journal of Romance Studies, Research in African Literatures, and The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature.
Dr James Meadway is Director of the Progressive Economy Forum and associate fellow of the Institute for Public Policy Research. Dr Meadway’s work has focused on developing viable alternatives to neoliberalism, and he has published widely on democratic ownership, environmental economics, and automation and the digital economy.
Professor Kate Williams is Professor of Public Engagement with History at the University of Reading. A lecturer and TV consultant in addition to being CNN’s royal historian, Prof. Williams has also hosted several documentaries on British television and appears regularly on both American and British networks. Williams is the New York Times bestselling author of three biographies—Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte, England’s Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton, and Becoming Queen Victoria: The Unexpected Rise of Britain’s Greatest Monarch—as well as a novel, The Pleasures of Men. Her articles and essays have been published in a wide range of books and journals.